Quick reaction following Sounders FC’s team meeting after a 2-1 road loss at RSL

“The truth,” said midfielder Steve Zakuani. “It’s not good enough at this point. … We have to take a long hard look in the mirror at ourselves. That first 45 minutes was the worst we’ve ever played as a team since I’ve been here. I don’t know what it was. I don’t have the answers. There was no energy; there was no fight. You can’t do it every night, but it just wasn’t good enough. We waited until the second half to play, but you can’t give a good team a 2-0 head-start. It’s tough. We’re 0-3-1 and that’s the reality. We’re not doing very well right now. We have to somehow sort it out. It’s every player has to look at himself in the mirror. Every player has to figure out why we’re not producing. We’re not doing enough, obviously. We’ve somehow got to change it.”

“We know we weren’t good enough,” said defender Djimi Traore. “We know we need to work hard. We should be better than that. We know we are better than what we did in the first 45 minutes. Now it’s time to react. We don’t need more talk — no more talk. We need to react on the pitch and be men and do better than that. We need to work hard in training, and I think the way you train is the way you play. … What we showed on the pitch was not the Seattle Sounders team. No. I think we need to change things. We need to take all the responsibility, and yes, of course, I’m part of that. I will take my responsibility and turn this thing around.”

“I think everybody has to be together and try to forget about what happened in the first half today,” said midfielder and captain Mauro Rosales. “It’s something where we’ll obviously learn about what we did wrong. We cannot step into a game and then be losing in the first 10 minutes almost 2-0. Then the game will be harder than normal. We did step up in the second half and did a good job, but it wasn’t enough to draw the game. They played much better than us, and this can’t happen again. We have to be alert. We have to forget about everything now and focus on the next game Tuesday in CONCACAF. It’s going to be very important for us and we need a win. We need everybody to be in form, focused and concentrated. We need everybody.”